Typical mission plan interface software for a general manned or unmanned vehicle allows operators to plan the tasks to be executed by each vehicle via a graphical user interface that includes various input and output options for feedback and control of the planning process. The graphical user interface typically provides a three-dimensional presentation that includes latitude, longitude, and altitude information in the display output relating to a proposed mission plan during pre-mission planning and also allows monitoring and control of real-time mission progress during mission execution. This includes updating way points, aborting plans, allowing manual override, and so forth. Typical graphical user interfaces to existing mission planning and control systems have limited abilities to analyze how changes to the current environment will impact tasks planned for execution in the future. This usually consists of limited abilities to visually compare the current iteration of a single plan for a single vehicle with the previous iteration of the same plan. Comparison is typically performed visually by a human operator comparing the route and each individual task within the mission plan against defined mission success criteria. Some methods attempt to provide computational metrics that quantify the performance of one or more aspects of the mission plan. These current methods are slow and manually cumbersome at evaluating the mission plan's performance for a single vehicle. Current methods are also typically tied to a single mission planner designed for a single specific vehicle further restricting their ability to evaluate alternatives for other vehicles of the same domain type or other vehicles of different domain types.
The current state of vehicle interface software creates a bottleneck when planning and managing the execution of a plurality of vehicles as each plan for each vehicle must be manually coordinated with the plans of all other vehicles involved in satisfying the same set of tasks. This bottleneck becomes a serious constraint when the number of vehicles exceeds two or three and is further exacerbated when the plurality of vehicles are heterogeneous (of different types) and a mixture of manned and unmanned teams.